Australia identifies gaps in child protection on Steam and Roblox
Fedir Kryshtovskyi02
October
2026
07:27
Australia’s eSafety online safety commission has identified significant gaps in child protection on the popular gaming platforms Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and <a href="https://comicvibe.com/minecraft-runs-inside-elden-ring-as-modders-mash-up-entire-games/” title=”Minecraft runs inside Elden Ring as modders mash up entire games”>Minecraft. As BBC News reports, the regulator found inconsistent approaches by the services to implementing safety measures for minors.
According to research data, nine out of ten Australian children aged 8 to 17 had played online games. eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said that children have the right to play online without the risk of contact with predators, sexual extortion, violent extremist material and other harmful content.
Concerns about Steam and Roblox
The report states that Valve, which owns Steam and Steam Chat, was the only one among the assessed companies not using industry-standard technology to detect and remove known harmful content. The regulator also concluded that Valve did not proactively use tools to detect child sexual exploitation material or violent material in chats: its existing systems primarily detected fraud.
Roblox and Valve used only internal datasets to train speech analysis systems and did not retrain these models regularly. Steam relied on users self-declaring their age, although the platform recently introduced age verification using credit cards. Roblox strengthened its age checks last December.
More current news is available on the UA.News Telegram channel Telegram.
Age verification and data sharing
In Minecraft and Fortnite, which offers child accounts, users can generally self-declare their age. This means that a person who identifies themselves as an adult can gain access to communication features with a higher level of risk.
The regulator also noted varying levels of information sharing between platforms and participation in industry initiatives. Mojang Studios, the developer of Minecraft, and Roblox shared expertise in combating child sexual exploitation and violent extremism online, whereas Valve did not. Fortnite developer Epic Games, according to the report, did not provide other platforms with information about cases of violations within a global programme to combat child sexual exploitation and sexual abuse.
The report is based on data collected by eSafety on protecting users from serious online harm between October 2025 and March 2026. The BBC contacted Valve, Epic Games, Roblox and Microsoft, which owns Minecraft, for comment.
